Publication:
Does It Matter Where You Grow Up? Childhood Exposure Effects in Latin America and the Caribbean

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2022-05-06
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2022-05-13
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This paper studies whether the observed differences in intergenerational educational mobility across regions in Latin America and the Caribbean are due to the sorting of families or the effect of growing up in these different places. The analysis exploits differences in the ages of children at the time their families moved across locations, to isolate regional childhood exposure effects from sorting. The findings show a convergence rate of 3.5 percent per year of exposure between age 1 to 11, implying that children who moved at age of 1 would pick up 35 percent of the observed differences in mobility between origin and destination. These results are robust to using a specification that identifies the effect of place within households, the use of only anomalously high migration outflows, instrumenting the choice of destination with historical migration, and a combination of both approaches.
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Munoz Saavedra, Ercio Andres. 2022. Does It Matter Where You Grow Up? Childhood Exposure Effects in Latin America and the Caribbean. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/37415 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.
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